In Gnome, you need GSConnect.

On the device, you need KDE Connect.

GSConnect

GSConnect is a Gnome Extension. If you have not already started using Gnome Extensions, read this. Long story shory: you can easily enable Gnome Extensions from a web browser, and that’s super handy. In this case, you’ll want to enable GSConnect. It’ll look like this:

Wow look at all my browser tabs. Cool, right? (Can you still trust me, now that you know?)

Nothing will look immediately different. You will, however, notice when you pull down the top right:

“Mobile Devices” now appears. (And look at all that stuff you know about my laptop now! Wow!) At this point (prior to installing KDE Connect on your phone / device), turning it on will do nothing of consequence, but you should turn it on, so that you can connect when we get KDE Connect running for you. So let’s move on to installing on your phone.

KDE Connect

Play Store / search KDE Connect / install.

Open KDE Connect.

It will discover the name of the machine running GSConnect. Click connect.

Over in the Gnome Environment, you should get a notification that something is trying to connect. You should accept this.

(When I first tried, I had a problem with the notification. It would disappear almost instantly, before I could accept. I found this page about the problem. But then I can’t remember what I did to fix it. Sorry.) ((I might have reinstalled or something simple like that. Shrug. I wasn’t expecting to write this article, but then my wife wanted to connect her Android phone to her Dell XPS 13, and I realised this is a good topic to write about. But alas, I hadn’t taken notes on my experience…. Live and learn, am-i-right?))

Once Connected

Check this out:

(Guess what kind of cheap phone I have?) And look at all the stuff you can now do. This is pretty powerful business. You’ll need to grant permission for Gnome to do stuff to and on the phone, and vice versa. All quite self-explanatory.

You can set things up so that, when connected, phone notifications will show up in your Gnome notifications area. You can also use the phone screen to move the mouse on your computer, which is fun so show off at parties (but I can’t find any other reason for this function, and, yes, I attend strange parties).

I’ll note: if you connect to “Messaging”, you’ll be connecting to the default SMS service on your phone. For example, I’ve been using Signal, and nothing I sent after I switched showed up on Messaging. AND (!) all my deleted messages showed up as well. (This is worth a second article some day….)

That’s it.

Now go.

Enjoy.

LibreOffice

The leader of the pack these days is LibreOffice, which is installed by default with Ubuntu Linux, among other distributions. LibreOffice Writer is the word processing component of the office suite. It can process every kind of Microsoft format you can imagine, plus more. The default file format for documents created in LibreOffice Writer is ODT, which stands for OpenDocument Text. This format is compatible with modern versions of Microsoft Word.

The software has a familiar look and feel. A blank document with all default settings looks like this:

There isn’t a “ribbon” style menu, as Microsoft Word has (sadly) embraced. According to Microsoft:

While you might simply refactor a traditional menu bar and toolbar design of an existing program to a ribbon format, doing so misses most of the value of using a ribbon. Ribbons have the most value when used to present immediate, results-oriented commands, often in the form of galleries and live previews. Results-oriented commands make commands easier to understand and users much more efficient and productive. Instead of refactoring your existing commands, it’s better to redesign completely how commands are performed in your program.

If you can find a better example of bullshit business speak, leave it in the comments. “Results-oriented commands”. Hah! Efficiency! Productivity! Man this has got it all. Why hasn’t LibreOffice embraced this revolution? Well they have.

If you want to experience the incalculable productivity boost of the ribbon style user interface, just do this, from “View / User interface…”:

I think “Tabbed” is the Microsoft rubbish ribbon style. But look, if it’s efficiency you want, I recommend setting up keyboard shortcuts to do all the stuff you regularly do. Toolbar style doesn’t matter a whit; once you have to remove your fingers from the keyboard to perform an action, you’re wasting time. Surely someone has studied this, but it’s incompatible with the popularly asserted (by Microsoft) value of performing any and all actions in a Graphical User Interface, so. This is Linux people: the keyboard is your friend. Embrace your friend.

(I have digressed. Oops.)

Anyway, there are alternatives to LibreOffice Writer.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is, essentially, an original version of LibreOffice. Long story short: there was a split between developers of OpenOffice after the rights were acquired by this and that billionaire multi-national leech (details irrelevant), and what we have now are two office suites developing side-by-side that are nearly identical. They are both robust and wonderful. But, given that Ubuntu chooses to bundle LibreOffice with their distribution, I choose inertia and go with that.

WPS

This is an interesting one. It’s proprietary, costs money, but by reputation is almost perfectly compatible with Microsoft Word. However, I’ve never run up against anything given to me in a Word format that LibreOffice couldn’t handle. Maybe I’m not the kind of user who runs into incompatability problems. I dunno.

I can tell you this: I installed WPS once — the free trial version — and it was bloody hard to uninstall. I wasn’t pleased with that. Maybe it looked more like Word, but I also don’t know about that; I don’t use Word.

If you’re looking for a free, open alternative to Word (obviously a good thing), this isn’t it. Proceed with the same caution your would exercise toward any non-open software.

Calligra

Here’s one that I know exists, but I’ve never used it. See, there’s this split in Linux environments between Gnome and KDE. I’ve always been more of a Gnome user. So, the stuff developed for the KDE environment hasn’t been on my radar.

Looks cool though. Give it a try and leave a comment about how you like it. (Hah. Comments.)

AbiWord

I’ll be honest here (am I ever dishonest here?) — I used to love AbiWord. But that was twenty years ago. Recently, for old times sake, I gave it a try again and. Sigh. What to say. Why wouldn’t I just use LibreOffice Writer? I don’t know.

In fact, I just tried to open one of my documents with it, and the damned thing crashed.

It has a small memory footprint, so if memory is a concern, this might be your answer.

TL;DR

LibreOffice Writer is good. Why are you still paying the richest people on the planet for the privilege to use an entirely replaceable and inferior product?

(Collaboration and Presentation)

OK, so some of you need to do collaborative work with “Teams” or whatever other bloated thing. The good news is that for the overwhelming majority of users, the web-based versions of whatever you need (Office 365?) work just fine.

If you’re worried about documents not looking the same if you open them on this computer with this version of this thing vs. that computer with that other version of that other thing, then you shouldn’t be using word processing software. Word processing software is not about consistent, professional-looking presentation. It’s about storing and editing words (content). For consistent, professional-looking presentation, you’re looking for desktop publishing software (things like Adobe InDesign, etc., or Scribus — the open source alternative) and you want a professional designer to make your content look amazing.

Summary

Liberate yourself.

For technical reasons, there are a few laptops out there that actually can’t run Linux; it’s to do with how their hard drives are configured; it’s to do with RAID, and your eyes are already glazing over. Fair enough.

Your best bet is to use a popular search engine and enter a term along the lines of “[some random laptop] linux”. There will be information about someone out there in the world who has tried Linux on this machine. It’s a big world; you will not be the first to wonder.

The big players these days (Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, and so on) have all the drivers you can imagine bundled up in their distributions. Generally, you’ll never have to install a driver; that’s a problem of the past — and it was a hell of a problem when it was a problem, back in the day.

A good idea is to try running Linux from a USB stick (or some other medium) and see that everything works. For example, Ubuntu offers instructions for creating a bootable medium and going for a test drive. I won’t reinvent the wheel they invented, but the basics are: download a thing, write that thing to a medium that is bootable, boot from that medium, have fun!

If you’re trying to see whether Linux will run on an old laptop, then you might want to try a minimal “Live Linux”. There are several options, with the most popular teeny tiny Linux being Puppy. (It can be good fun to just hack around with tiny distributions if you want to learn some of the basics and some of the non-mainstream software options.)

Assuming that everything is working from the live distribution, use whatever graphical installer they offer and go for it!

If you want to, you can install Linux along side some other operating system, like Windows. To do so, you’ll need to create partitions — scary! But the installer will help you along, and again, assuming you’re following along with someone who has done this before on your laptop of choice, you’ll have a model to follow. In a case like this, you’ll be creating a “dual boot” system, and the world is full of instructions of how to set this up. (I can’t really help because I’ve never done this because Windows: yuck.)

Long story short: yes you can run Linux on your laptop, with very few exceptions. And these days, installation is as easy as booting from a removeable drive and following basic instructions.

Have a go. Good luck. Enjoy your freedom.

First, bring up your “Settings”. You can do this through the drop down in the top right corner, if you’re using Gnome. Or, you can hit the “Super” key (usually the “Window” key), then typing “settings”.

Here’s mine.

Oh my god now you know my gmail.com address. Whelp….

See, it’s pretty simple these days. Just click “Online Accounts”, then click on Google, then enter your information and accept that Linux will be able to access your stuff, and you’re in business.

Now, your calendar should be integrated in the top bar of Gnome. Like this:

As you can see, I prefer a pretty basic setup. See those dots under the days? Those are all events on my Google Calendar. Events will show up in the “Notifications” area, as appropriate. “No Events” today. Oh well.

For further tips on how to set up your Gnome environment as incredibly simply as mine, refer to my Tweaks post.

For now, enjoy how easy they’ve made it .

The solution is simple enough with a few commands, but you’ll have to use the terminal for this one.

First, the symptom: Using Firefox, it was not possible to scroll using the touchscreen. Instead, all you could do was click links or select text. You could drag the scrollbar, but generally this is not the behaviour of a tablet, and tablet behaviour was what we expected.

The solution: You need X11 Gestures, touchegg, and to adjust a few settings in Firefox and elsewhere.

First, ensure that you have touchegg installed (this link is for an older version of Ubuntu, but the same principle applies).

Next, assuming you’re using Gnome (Ubuntu out of the box uses Gnome), you’ll want to install X11 Gestures. This is a Gnome Shell Extension, and if you’ve not set yourself up to use those, you’ll want to set up Gnome Shell Extensions now.

At this point, your problem will not be solved. There are two more subtle steps, and they have to do with security, so proceed with caution. (You’ll be OK. I believe in you.)

In Firefox, in about:config, set dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled=1. Here that is in monospace:

dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled=1

Now, you need to edit a file that only root (the administrator) can edit. The instruction is this: edit /etc/security/pam_env.conf and add MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 DEFAULT=1

I use an editor called vim. You can use whatever editor you want. gedit is popular. nano is popular. Whatever you’ve settled on, use that. Replace in these commands as necessary.

sudo vim /etc/security/pam_env.conf

Once in the file, ensure you have a line that looks like this (the last blue line):

Save the file and reload modules — or just bloody reboot — as necessary.

Was all of this necessary? To be honest, I don’t know exactly; I’m unsure whether the X11 Gestures were necessary, but they’re cool and you should have them. I know that pinching and scrolling didn’t work in Firefox until these last two steps, so they’re essential.

Following this, I bought my own Lenovo Yoga 530 and set all this up. Then, when I installed Google Chrome, it worked seamlessly. So, officially, this is a troubleshooting guide for Firefox in Gnome with a touchscreen.

Enjoy.

There are two options. First, you can use Teams in a web browser. Second, you can install a native Linux client.

When I have to use Teams for work (I wouldn’t use it if it weren’t imposed on me), I can get all the functionality I need from the browser, so I stick with that.

If you install the native client, get ready to use a lot of RAM! It’s quite the resource hog. And, when you install the client, it sets itself up to auto-start, and it installs a software repository to keep itself up to date. Bear this in mind: it really infests your system and imposes itself on you.

As far as in-the-browser use, I’ve found that Google Chrome operates with the smallest memory footprint. If you’re opposed to Chrome, then there’s always Chromium. And Teams works perfectly well in Firefox as well, but I find the memory footprint larger, with my setup.

(I have a geeky concern about such things, so I spend time assessing the resources used by observing the System Monitor.)

In short, Teams works perfectly well in Linux. But it should, obviously, be avoided at all costs.

The question is: What’s the best Linux distribution for your purposes. The answer will depend, partly, on how much effort you want to put in to installing Linux.

First a note on “distribution”. A “distribution” is, more or less, a kernel, a set of imoprtant libraries, a selection of important software, a window manager, and a desktop environment.

The kernel is the glue that holds all your hardware together. It’s a set of instructions (again, more or less) that tell things like the keyboard how to interact with the screen. And all manner of other hardware connections.

Important libraries and software are the things that get the machine doing things. I know that’s vague. But at this stage, unless you’re intending to dig into the real nuts and bolts of how the Linux operating system works, all you need to know is that it’s the cool stuff, like web browsers, word processors, media players and so on.

A window manager is a piece of software that defines what it’s like to be a window, and interacts with the kernel. There are two main players in Linux: Xorg and Wayland. The details are not essential to getting you up and running; soffice to say, Wayland is newer and tries to address some weaknesses and inefficiencies of Xorg. But either will work perfectly fine for garden variety day-to-day use.

The desktop environment includes things like sidebars, top bars, menus and the like. There are a lot of competing environments out there, but the ones you’ll likely run into are Gnome and KDE. They’ve always been the big players. (Currently, I use Gnome, so these articles will be rather Gnome-centric).

Now, for the purists among you (and this used to be me!) there’s Slackware. It’s the oldest still-maintained Linux distribution. But installation is not for the feint-hearted. If you’re just getting started, and just want to experience the Linux desktop, this is not for you. However, if you’re interested in learning Linux at a much deeper level, challenge yourself with Slackware.

If you want a lot of control over what will be installed, then Arch might be for you. Again, it helps to have some knowledge of what’s going on under the hood. So again, depending on your purposes….

Debian is an extremely stable distribution and is the foundation for several other popular distributions, most notably Ubuntu. Debian includes only truly free software, so any third-party software will be up to you to install. If you want Debian’s stability with all the bells and whistles already available, then Ubuntu is an excellent option. Similarly popular is Mint, which is based on Ubuntu.

“Based on”: anyone can create a Linux distribution, and one way to do so is to pick one that already exists, then modify it for some purpose. The makers of Ubuntu have decided to start with a very stable distribution and modify that. The makers of Mint … You see how this goes.

I’m at a point in my life where I just install a full-featured distro (short for “distribution”) and remove anything I don’t want. I was a dedicated Debian user for a long time, but with kids and other responsibilities, I simply don’t have the time to install third-party stuff in a pinch — especially now that the kids have their own devices! Ubuntu (and Mint for that matter) is easy to administer and their software repositories contain everything I want.

A note on “repositories”. These are libraries of software that the makers of the distribution have bundled up into “packages” and offer for download. Linux offers several ways to interact with these packages, both graphically and from a command line. Details will vary from distribution to distribution, so you’ll need to look into how the tools work in the distribution you choose. (Debian and Ubuntu use apt (Advanced Package Tool), which does a good job of keeping track of dependencies and resolving conflicts.)

Summary: If you want to install and go pretty quickly, then Ubuntu or Mint are good places to start. Check out some screen shots and reviews and see which one resonates with you. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of things, look toward Arch or Slackware.